


Four Thrones

by shinealightonme



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Family, Fish out of Water, Gen, Kings & Queens, Nation Building, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-05 01:16:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15159218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinealightonme/pseuds/shinealightonme
Summary: "They tell you stories about Cinderella and such," Susan said. "Only they don't tell you how she must have felt, to suddenly be a princess."





	Four Thrones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Seika](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seika/gifts).



> For Seika, who wanted to see how Peter and Su and Ed and Lu became kings and queens of Narnia. I hope you like this!

Doubtless you have heard the story of how four children from our world came to Narnia and became King Peter the Magnificent and Queen Susan the Gentle and King Edmund the Just and Queen Lucy the Valiant, which is a very good story and, to credit my predecessor, very well told.

Now part of telling a story is knowing where to end it. If you tell a story about star-crossed lovers whose love finally prevails, for example, you leave off after the vows have been spoken; you do not end your story with them quarreling at the grocers over cuts of beef after they return from their honeymoon. Likewise if you are telling a story of a brilliant detective on the trail of a dastardly criminal, you do not write "fin" before your detective has deduced whodunit. But this means, of course, that any story has more of it that could be told, and the story of the Pevensies is no different.

The coronation was a party the likes of which Narnia had rarely seen before, and not once during all its long winter -- naiads dancing with dryads dancing with foxes, leopards chasing around the edges of the parties, rabbits and dwarfs and smallest of the cats moving up to dance atop tabletops as the evening wore on, and no one even minded about decorum. Nothing could be improper on such a happy occasion.

The night wore down until it was only Peter and Susan and Edmund and Lucy left in the throne room. It was so very late at night that it had become early again, and they were still awake and wearing their fancy clothes, but they had removed their crowns and sat on large pillows on the floor and the girls' hair was tumbling down in loose clumps. They needed sleep but didn't want it, and took food instead; they had been provided with several trays of sandwiches, the kind that you or I would find quite dull but that your parents save for the fanciest of occasions. And of course this being Narnia even cucumber triangles with the crusts cut off were as light and crisp and delicious as your favorite fresh fruit just picked off the tree.

"They tell you stories about Cinderella and such," Susan said. "Only they don't tell you how she must have felt, to suddenly be a princess."

"I know what you mean," Edmund said. "I've no idea how to be a princess."

"The first thing we've got to do," Peter said firmly, "is help people."

"And there's such a lot of people to help," Lucy sighed.

"Well," Edmund said, "we've got this great big throne room."

The throne room was indeed great, in both scale and spectacle. It had fine carved statues and a roof so high that the children all standing on top of each other couldn't have reached it, and best of all, wide tall doors on the end that opened up to the ocean. The night was so fine that they had left the doors open and none of them even felt cold. It was a very fine evening indeed, when the world let in all of the sound of waves and sea salt air and none of the chill, as though everything could be lovely forever.

The next morning saw their first chance to follow their convictions. There were indeed a lot of people in Narnia who needed help. For starters, there were all of the animals and centaurs and good dwarfs and whatnot who had fought in the battle against the White Witch. Of course Lucy had done her very best with the cordial Father Christmas had given her, and had saved many lives that might otherwise have been lost.

But even with such a gift and so well applied, there were those who had been injured in the battle, and others who had performed particular feats of bravery, and the new kings and queens took their first day in their thrones to meet with all of them, the injured and the heroes and, of course, the many among them who were both.

It was a good day's work, and necessary, but by the end of it the children were quite tired, and Lucy was in tears. The elder children kept their composure better, but they too felt Lucy's pain. It was hard to see those who had risked so much, and not always kept what they risked, in order to put them on their new thrones.

"Oh, you dear," Lucy cried, as a She-Polecat told them their story of how she had went out to the fighting to help her father, only to find him lost already. "Oh, haven't you anyone to take care of you?"

"No, Your Highness," the She-Polecat said. Her voice trembled when she spoke, but no one mentioned it. Susan thought she was very brave.

"Oh, you must come live with us here in the castle," Lucy said, and no one could argue with Lucy when she wanted something so. Her passion was so strong and pure that no one wanted to be the one to crush it.

Peter did have a word with Susan, after the Beavers had fussed around them sufficiently that they agreed to close the throne room for the night and have a proper sit-down dinner, about whatever was to become of the polecat.

"Oh, we can't send her away," Susan pleaded.

"I wouldn't dream of it," Peter said. "If anyone deserves our help it's someone who lost their family. When I think about if it were you or Lucy or Edmund -- and anyway, I can't say no to Lucy. She never asks for anything that isn't for someone else."

Susan agreed that Peter was entirely right.

"Yes, but," Susan said. She wasn't sure that this was the sort of thing a person ought to say, especially a queen, but it was only her brother that she was speaking to. And if she could trust Lucy to be generous, she could trust Peter with her un-queenly thoughts. "Oh, Peter, what do we do with an orphaned polecat?"

Peter had no more of an idea than Susan, and he had had the sort of education that I hope you have not had, dear reader, but which many have. He'd been taught that the most important thing was that he know the answer at all times, and if he didn't he must pretend that he did; but he felt a tug, like he had when Aslan had told him to clean his sword, that this was not how a king behaved. If he could trust Lucy to care for their subjects, he could trust Susan with his ignorance. "I don't know," he admitted.

They were not prepared to bring the matter up so openly with Lucy. They approached Edmund, instead, while Mr. Tumnus was telling Lucy a story about a sailor and a cyclops. Edmund was eavesdropping and quite interested to hear how the matter ended, but of course he stepped aside to speak to Peter and Susan.

"It seems to me," he said, after they had laid out their concerns for him. "That this is a very large castle. Surely there will need to be people to clean up and arrange the people coming for rulings and -- oh, light the fires and all that. Perhaps we could find a place with her there?"

This seemed very wise to Peter and Susan. Except, as Susan realized first, and her brothers shortly thereafter, they had no idea how a castle was run.

"Never fear," Peter said, who felt that this was an instance where a bit of bravado was not out of place. "We'll speak to Mrs. Beaver -- she arranged those lovely sandwiches last night with some of the ladies -- she knows how to run a house."

"Only," Edmund started, and then wondered if he ought not to withhold his doubts for one more day.

And then he looked across the room, to where Lucy's eyes were shining in firelight as she listened to Mr. Tumnus's story, and he found that it took quite as much courage to speak his doubts as it had to stand up to the White Witch. But he had found that courage once, and it was easier the second time.

"If we don't know how to run a house -- much less a castle," he continued. "How're we to run a country?"

And of course Peter and Susan had no answer to this, except to look across the room, too, to where Lucy was now clasping her hand to her mouth.

"We'll speak to everyone we can find," Peter said, as Mr. Tumnus' story wound to a conclusion. "We'll find someone who knows. Or knows enough for starting. After that -- " he looked to Susan.

"After that," she said, "we'll figure it out. Cinderella did it, why not us?"

They did find time for a word with Mrs. Beaver, and quick as a wink the She-Polecat had the loveliest little room to stay in and a place among all of the other creatures who were getting Cair Paravel set up once more as a working castle.

The children didn't have time to worry much about how the castle was run, after all. They were all much too busy. More folks came to see them after they had finished speaking to all of the veterans and survivors of the fight against the White Witch. They had so many more subjects than any of them had ever realized, and it seemed that every last one of them needed something. In no time at all Peter and Susan and Edmund and Lucy had been beset by all manner of problems, many of which they hadn't the least idea how to solve.

They did try asking their friends for advice. Mr. and Mrs. Beaver were always happy to listen, but beavers, while solid folk, are better at constructing dams than governments. Mr. Tumnus was very well read but also a very introverted and theoretical sort of person. Peter had his war counsel, but it is one thing to know how to lay siege and an entirely different matter to know what you do with the castle once you have captured it. And of course the kings and queens did not know how to rule, as that is not a subject taught in English schools (or only in very special schools, which are very expensive and even more tedious than most schools, if you can believe such a thing to be possible).

More and more they heard from people who the White Witch had turned into statues, who had now been turned back into people. Lucy and Susan, upon witnessing the transformations, had imagined that was very neatly as happy an ending as anyone could ever hope for; but they were realizing now that this was not the case for all. Many of the former statues had homes, of course, and joyous families to welcome them back. But, I am sad to say, many did not. They had been stone too long and had nowhere to go; their homes now housed others.

"We can't kick a family out of the home they live in," Susan fretted in the private chambers that lay just behind the throne room. The children had all thought upon seeing it that this was a sort of waiting room, if there was no business to trouble a king or a queen. Now they were all beginning to suspect it was meant to be a fretting room. That was certainly how they had been using it, and they certainly had no need for a room to wait in until business arose.

"Yes," Edmund agreed. "But we can't just let a bear live without a home. It's inhumane. It's -- unbearable," and Peter and Susan reminded Edmund sternly that puns were the lowest form of humor, though Lucy giggled, which was of course his intention.

"Edmund's right, though," Peter said, as of course Edmund had meant, too -- humor and sincerity can walk quite well hand in hand, no matter what the stuffy grown-ups tell you. "We can't just leave him, he's been out in the cold too long, through no fault of his own."

"No," Edmund said, "it's rather to his credit, that he angered the Witch."

Peter thought, and Susan thought as well that, having forgiven Edmund for his betrayal, and Edmund having atoned and made things right, the best thing for everyone would be if they could not speak of it again. And yet life, and their younger brother, seemed determined to remind them of the past.

Susan was drawing a breath to speak, to say something supportive about how Edmund had angered the Witch as much as anyone, when Lucy cried out.

"Oh, don't you remember -- there was a She-Bear here last week? The one who's son was lost in the fighting." And of course they remembered; she had been proud and stoic as any hero could hope to be, and they had sent her home with gifts of fruit and honey and the largest fish any of them had ever seen, and Lucy had wept bitterly that night thinking about the old mother in an empty den. "She could take him in. She's the room for it, and he could help her around the home."

"Lucy," Peter said. "It's a lovely thought. But people aren't as simple as playing houses with dolls."

"We could ask, though, couldn't we?" and after listening to several more impossible problems from their subjects and another session of fretting in the fretting room, Peter had to admit he had no better ideas.

They received a letter by messenger the next day that the old mother bear was willing to take in the former statue, who sent off at once. He was, he told Lucy, most thankful for their hospitality, but he wasn't comfortable with all of the noise and sounds and people of the castle.

It was the only good news of the day. A case came in front of them of another statue, a hare who had angered the Witch not by standing up to her, but by stealing from her larder while he was in her service. The hare had been transformed back into life by Aslan, along with the rest of the statues, but had returned to his burrow to find that his neighbors had destroyed most of his belongings.

His story, as it emerged, prompted the children's advisers to speak out quite harshly against him, deciding that the vandalism had been only what he deserved, or perhaps even less than he deserved. Mr. Beaver in particular became so incensed that he interrupted the High King, and had to be ushered out of the throne room by the equally incensed but rather more civil Mrs. Beaver.

"Thank you, Mr. Hare," Peter said, and if you think that this is too formal and proper a way to address a traitor I can say only that Peter was after all a king, and that sometimes being very formal and proper is its own sort of nastiness. If you have ever had an adult look down their nose at you and say your entire name then I am sure you know what I mean. "We will consider your situation most thoroughly."

As though they could do anything else! Long after the hare had been shown out to wait in the rooms set aside for visitors -- with the She-Polecat and the other castle minders dragging their heels about bringing him tea and dinner -- Peter and Susan and Edmund and Lucy were still discussing the situation with their most trusted friends.

"He's a traitor," the wisest of the centaurs pointed out. "And a thief. He ought to be locked up before he can betray anyone else."

"Who is there to betray?" Susan asked. "We aren't going to ask our subjects to tell tales on each other, like the Witch did."

"A traitor will always show his true colors eventually."

"Not always," Edmund said, and there was another one of those awkward moments that I have spoken of, where Peter and Susan did wish the past could be past. "But that's besides the point. We aren't here to rule on his crimes; no one has come to us complaining of them, and they weren't committed during our reign. The problem is that our of our subjects has no home."

"He helped himself before," Mrs. Beaver said, "Let him help himself now." (Mr. Beaver was still outside the chambers, drinking tea and trying to calm himself. Occasionally he would slap the ground with his tail, as though to punctuate a point in a silent argument.)

"I don't see that he's your subject when he answered to the Witch," the centaur said again. "By all the old rules, he's her property."

"Yes, but she's gone," Susan said. "And the Stone Table is broken." And she did not say, would you have it otherwise, but all present heard it.

"I have found," said Mr. Tumnus, who had his own empathy for those who had made bad decisions, "historically speaking, that picking and choosing who one considers worthy of aid rarely leads to good consequences."

"We can't simply let someone suffer," Lucy said, and that settled the matter. A new place was found for the hare to live, though before he departed the next morning Edmund requested an audience with him alone, in the fretting room, and while neither I nor anyone else besides the two of them know what was said that day, the hare left the room silent and shaken, and never gave any of his new neighbors any reason to be troubled.

After they had finished meeting with all of the former statues, and settling the issues of reintegrating them into the life of Narnia, they all rather hoped they would have a bit of a break.

Instead, there were only more and varied questions. This family was quarreling with that naiad over fishing rights in a particular river; this giant had crushed a merchant's cart and had no way to pay the damages because, as you know, giants are terrible with money; that hedgehog had died without naming an heir, and all eighteen of his sons were cross about it.

"We ought to have an assembly," Peter said one day, or rather one night, for it was quite late in Cair Paravel by this point. He was looking over a map of a river delta that had come up disputed between three different families and a host of dryads, and for the very first time that he could remember, he was thinking it would be so much easier if someone couldn't just have produced a perfect replica image of the land, instead of having to draw it out by hand. Some kind of -- picture perfect image. He thought there might be a word for that, only he was too busy keeping straight the lineage of all of the families involved. "It's much more sensible to establish the big rules first, and then we'll have a frame work to fit in things like this."

Susan thought this is a lovely idea, but then Susan had once (as I'm sure you, reader, have had once, or perhaps severally) had a friend who was forever having lovely ideas that never came to be. She was beginning to think that Peter's assembly was another such lovely idea, though being as kind as you would expect from someone known as The Gentle she did not say as much.

"We ought to have an assembly," Peter said again the next day, to all the kings and queens and advisers. "Get all the people who know how things work in Narnia together."

"The problem," Mr. Tumnus pointed out, "is that anyone who's been doing that sort of work in Narnia was doing it for the White Witch."

"The first order of business is that anything the Witch did, we won't do," Edmund said, and of course they all thought this was very sensible and said so.

And it emerged, from talking to anyone they could find left to talk to about such things, that most of what the White Witch had done was not to do anything. Her police had troubled themselves only with tracking down people who threatened or displeased her; they hadn't stuck their noses in anywhere that the quarrel was only between two Narnians. And all over the countryside there were buildings and road and bridges which had been crumbling away for years under the snow, and many of them were being brought down entirely by the torrential melt. Peter's promised assembly got pushed back, and pushed back again, as they had to scramble to find ways to prop up all of the crumbling architecture.

It became so bad that one morning Peter was awoken quite early by one of the leopards who had been his standard bearer in battle, that a dam had collapsed and a village nearby was flooding, and with no better idea how to handle the situation he told the leopard to gather the army to march out immediately and changed into clothes -- rather too fine for the situation, but a king does not have many pairs of ratty old trousers the way that you or I do.

"The next thing I shall do," Peter said, "is commission someone to make me clothes without any embellishment or embroidery. And then I shall have an assembly," and the leopard, who had just poked his head back into the room to tell him that the army stood ready for him, decided to pretend that he had not just witnessed the High King of Narnia talking to his shirt cuffs.

Peter had not asked for anyone to tell his siblings what was passing, but as he reached the stables he found that they were there already, Edmund mounting up and Susan and Lucy helping each other with their riding gloves. The polecat, who had deft little paws and doted on Lucy, was fixing her hair into a braid.

"You needn't ride out so early," Peter said.

"Don't be silly," Susan told him. "They're our subjects, too."

"And," Edmund said, "I can't see that you'd do a lot of good rebuilding a dam all by yourself."

"Stow it," Peter said with a grin, "I've got an army, you know."

"Very threatening," Edmund said. "I can see I'll have to be properly respectful of you, oh High King," and the polecat laughed and then looked quite nervous about laughing. Lucy patted her hand and told her that she could take her leave if she liked, which she very much did.

"You too, Lu?" Peter asked, though he felt as he said it that it was a futile question. If anyone was going to protest sitting at home while others did work, it was Lucy. "You could have a bit of a lie-in today. You deserve it, and no one expects you to help with building."

"Nonsense! There'll be plenty that needs doing besides that. Someone's got to -- oh, hand out blankets, and tell stories, and cheer up everyone who's just come out of the water." She was struggling, as she spoke, to get her legs up over her little pony, but she still looked and sounded so regal that her sister and brothers were quite impressed and envious, and Peter decided against trying to convince her to stay home.

He did sigh, looking back over his shoulder as Cair Paravel fell into the distance, the army riding behind them, Mr. Beaver consulting with the centaurs about how best to construct a series of temporary dams to hold back the flood waters.

"I was hoping we could have an assembly today."

Edmund and Susan exchanged a look and then glanced away. Peter had a very good temper, for a king, but after being laughed at by the polecat it would be quite a lot to ask him to stomach two of his fellow monarchs laughing at him as well.

"Someday," Susan promised, when she was able to speak without giving away her gaiety.

"But how are we supposed to learn to be kings?" Peter asked.

"Oh, Peter," Lucy said, "what do you think you've been doing all along?" and she spurred her mount into a trot, the faster to get to her duty.

**Author's Note:**

> If you like this fic, you can [reblog it on tumblr](http://toast-the-unknowing.tumblr.com/post/176128803860/four-thrones-shinealightonme-chronicles-of).


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